| > e.g. it hasn't yet happened in Britain Granted, I don't follow it closely, but from what discourse I've observed things on the other side of the pond don't seem quite harmonious to me. > I'm not that sure it was entirely true even in the US between 1940 and 1980 either. Which does not necessarily disprove the argument. Things were arguably less polarized and better working in the past, but my argument is exactly that the political incentives of a two-party system will eventually cause things to degenerate. The fact that things were once "reasonable politics" but have, over the course of decades, degenerated to "our policy is whatever is the opposite of their policy" is exactly the issue. > Is it radically different in multiparty systems, though? If you are outside the government coalition you have similar incentives. Similar, yes, but not necessarily the most effective political move. If a disenfranchised voter can vote for a third (or fourth) party without their vote "being wasted", a strategizing disenfranchised voter no longer "has" to vote for a "least-worst" option in order to avoid the "most-worst" option. In that case, painting your opponent as "even worse" does not necessarily win you votes. If it does, it likely also gives votes to the other parties in your political sphere, and if they get enough votes to make a coalition government without you, why should they bother to include someone whose primary policy is being a troublemaker? --- To be clear, no system is perfect. I don't know what the best is, I just know it's not FPTP. The primary argument I am trying to make is that the polarization we see now is the inevitable (long-term) outcome of a two-party system, and that a two-party system is the inevitable outcome of winner-takes-all FPTP. |